Educating for Marriage, Sort Of

Dana Mack

In the past ten years a promising trend
has taken hold. Divorce rates have leveled off, premarital sexual activity rates
are declining, and surveys show that hopes for future marital satisfaction and
permanence among the young are high. A 1997 Louis Harris poll, for example,
revealed that 94 percent of college freshmen considered a happy marriage among
their most important life goals. And more than three–quarters believe present
laws make divorce too easy to procure. Americans are seriously interested in
reviving a culture of stable marriage.

Part of this renewed interest has been
stimulated by public policy makers who, recognizing the troubling social, emotional,
and economic legacy of divorce, have decided to act. Determined to test new
ways to encourage lasting marriages, they have directed many of their efforts
toward encouraging marriage preparation programs in schools and churches. Florida
has taken the lead here. Finding that “the state has a compelling interest in
educating its citizens with regard to marriage and, if contemplated, the effects
of divorce,” the Florida Marriage Preparation and Preservation Act of 1998 provides
a discount on marriage license fees to couples who take marital preparation
courses. The state has also commissioned a scholarly evaluation of such courses,
and has mandated high schools to incorporate marriage instruction as part of
an existing required course in life management skills.

The push for high school marriage preparation
is especially encouraging. But it would be more effective if the leaders of
the marriage preservation movement—in Florida and elsewhere—saw marriage education
in its broadest light, as an introduction to the history, cultural richness,
social utility, and civic meaning of marriage as an institution. Unfortunately,
what passes for marriage preparation in the thousands of schools and churches
around the country that currently offer it to teenagers is not marriage preparation
at all.

In a recently published report entitled
Hungry Hearts: Evaluating the New Curricula for Teens on Marriage and Relationships,
I examined ten self–proclaimed marriage preparation programs used in over two
thousand middle and high schools across the country. These curricula focus almost
entirely on building “relationship skills”—a form of communications training
that presents students with a set of scripts designed to foster honesty, tact,
negotiation, sympathy, and compromise in interpersonal confrontations. This
training is not exactly in how to make better marriages; it treats marriage
as a form of relationship and teaches “relationship enhancement” in general—whether
at school, at work, in dating, or in the family setting.

Indeed, several programs were not only
reluctant to distinguish marriage from other intimate relationships, they even
avoided using the word “marriage” in their lessons. Among the most striking
examples was Lori H. Gordon’s PEERS—a twenty–six unit high school course in
self–exploration and relationship dynamics that only very rarely refers to marriage,
although the author is a widely known expert on marriage, and in her dedication
page expresses her desire to “improve [young people’s] chances for giving and
receiving love, and eventually enjoying a happy marriage.”

Curiously, of those few curricula that
did use the word “marriage” liberally, two spent much of their time issuing
to young people strong warnings against getting married. Such was the case with
the American Bar Association program, Partners, which centered heavily
on marital conflict, domestic violence law, and divorce. Similarly, David Olson
et al.’s Building Relationships contained a multitude of dismal warnings
to teenagers about the “risks” of marriage, among them: “In this country, getting
into a bad marriage is much easier than getting out of one.”

There is nothing wrong in itself about
warning young people against precipitous marriages, or giving them instruction
in communication skills. Indeed, there may even be a powerful argument for communication
skills training as an integral component of marriage preparation. In Reweaving
the Tapestry: Toward a Public Philosophy and Policy for Families, Don Browning
and Gloria Rodriguez aptly observe that in promoting communication skills training,
the marriage movement pursues what in the field of political philosophy “Jürgen
Habermas calls ‘discourse ethics,’ the rules and skills governing communication
for solving problems and facilitating joint action.” “As societies become more
differentiated and pluralistic,” the authors say, “we must all learn more fair
and effective ways of communicating—in business, in government, and in everyday
practical relations, but first of all within marriage and family.”

Nevertheless, there is a problem when
high school courses on marriage, in their focus on facilitating communication,
ignore those issues particular to marriage and especially relevant to teenagers—for
example, the ways in which premarital behavior is likely to affect whom a person
marries and whether the marriage will be successful. Perhaps it is a sign of
the decay of courtship customs (if we mean by courtship not simply dating, but
the conscious, formal process of mate selection) that only one curriculum, Richard
Panzer’s excellent RQ: Building Relationship Intelligence, broaches the
subject of teen dating as a rehearsal for mate selection and marriage, or urges
premarital sexual abstinence on teens. Indeed, all the other curricula blithely
ignore data suggesting that patterns of early sexual involvement and serial
pair bonding during the adolescent years are likely to have a negative impact
on young people’s ability to settle into happy, permanent unions. An especially
egregious example is Charlene R. Kamper’s Connections: Dating and Emotions
(ostensibly a companion course to her Connections: Relationships and Marriage),
which contains only one reference to marriage—and this only in the Foreword
to the Teacher’s Manual. No attempt is made in this program to set teenage dating
in the broader context of courtship and marriage. And the program’s mild warnings
against premature sexual involvement seem unduly resigned to teen promiscuity.

In pretending that there is no connection
between current dating behaviors and young people’s ultimate goal of happy,
permanent unions, many high school marriage programs do nothing to discourage
the kind of casual sex that hardens young people and foments distrust between
men and women. But worse, in addressing the challenges of sexually intimate
relationships as generic communication problems, these programs may lead young
people into believing that communication “skills” are all that it takes to make
marriages work. There is little convincing evidence that such skills—e.g., “I
statements,” “anger rituals,” and active listening techniques—are the secret
to enduring marriages. In a study of newlyweds published in the Journal of
Marriage and the Family, marriage therapist John Gottman and colleagues
found that most successful marriages owed little, if anything, to such skills.
What evidence we have on successful marriages tends to support the notion that
commitment, not communication skills, promotes marital happiness. Researchers
Paul Amato and Allan Booth recently found, for example, that couples who entered
marriage with “favorable attitudes toward divorce tended to experience declines
in relationship quality,” whereas those who maintained the view that marriage
is for keeps “tended to experience improvements in relationship quality, or
at least a slowdown in the gradual decline in marital happiness and interaction
that characterizes many marriages.”

If attitudes and ideals about marriage
are so important, then it would make sense for marriage educators to introduce
students to the ways our culture has viewed and promoted this institution. Yet
most of these programs instead focus on marriage solely as a private emotional
bond, the principal goal of which is self–actualization. Absent are reflections
from the fields of sociology, anthropology, or history, and few programs offer
literary or aesthetic inspiration that might present marriage as beautiful and
encourage teenagers to strive for an enduring, self–forgetting love.

To some extent, the idea that communication
skills are the basis of marriage preparation is just part of a general shift
in education from teaching cultural narratives and ideal forms to providing
technical information and psychotherapeutic advice. In preparing our children
for marriage, at least, we would be well–advised to buck this trend. In an age
of expressive individualism, as models of marital stability become increasingly
rare and young people are uprooted from their culture, marriage educators would
do well to go beyond relationship talk, and to persuade young people that marriage
is a spiritual, moral, and civic vocation, a universal institution deeply rooted
in culture and human instinct, and not just one among many relationships.

In fact, there are resources on the market
that offer such a deeper understanding of marriage. The Art of Loving Well,
a literary anthology of romance and marriage by Nancy McLaren et al., is a wonderful
program for young adolescents, enabling them to explore their life goals, sexual
values, and family relationships in an aesthetically satisfying context, and
at an emotionally safe distance. The American Library Association offers a set
of arts and humanities–oriented programs on love, courtship, and marriage. Entitled
Courtly Love in the Shopping Mall, these programs could easily be adapted
for schools and churches. Finally, Leon and Amy Kass’ book on courtship, Wing
to Wing: Oar to Oar, is a welcome source–reader for older high school and
college age students. An in–depth exploration of the evolution of Western ideals
of courtship and marriage, the book offers profound reflections on the all–important
ontological and spiritual dimensions of mate selection and marriage.

It is heartening that such resources
are being made available. It will be even more heartening when those responsible
for teaching marriage preparation begin to use them more widely.

Dana Mack is director of the Childhood
and Adolescence Project at the Institute for American Values. She is the author
of The Assault on Parenthood (Encounter) and editor of the forthcoming The
Book of Marriage: The Wisest Answers to the Toughest Questions (Eerdmans).